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In Monday’s post recapping Adrian Lurssen & John Hellerman’s recent webinar, we talked about their advice to see the world from your audience’s point of view. Today, we’ll look at their next point, to think like an editor.

Adrian kicked off this section with a quote from Barger & Wolen’s Heather Morse:

What are your competitors writing about? What new cases have been decided? What news articles are trending? What are the other bloggers saying? Any new legislative actions? I subscribe to numerous RSS feeds and have them all categorized so I can quickly scan to see what’s happening in our industry sectors. I can then relay story ideas to our team of bloggers.”

This is excellent, excellent advice. Heather is suggesting that you use various sources to stay on top of what’s happening in the marketplaces that your attorneys work in, and then filter through to them the story ideas that they can write about. You can then send them follow up topics.Continue Reading Think Like an Editor – A Webinar Recap

There are some truly brilliant people in our industry, and the week before last, I was fortunate to hear two of them present in a webinar:  JD Supra‘s Adrian Lurssen and Hellerman Baretz Communication‘s John Hellerman.  The webinar addressed the topic of using editorial focus and insights to create content that gets noticed. 

They kicked off the webinar with the advice that we should be looking at the world from our audience’s point of view. Since there’s a lot of meaty information in the webinar recap, I’ll break the post up. Continue Reading Use Editorial Focus & Insights to Create Content that Gets Noticed – A Webinar Recap

Today, I had the pleasure of sitting in on a webinar presentation from my friends Nancy Myrland of Myrland Marketing and Lance Godard of JD Supra. The Social Media Special Interest Group for the Legal Marketing Association has been putting on monthly webinars, and this month’s focused on Twitter. 

Since it is a member benefit, I won’t give all the secrets away, but I did want to offer the highlights: Continue Reading Let’s Talk Twitter: An LMA Social Media SIG Webinar

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been working on developing a few sub-groups for our International Lawyers Group member group on LinkedIn.  These groups are online forums for our Specialty Groups, which member firm attorneys participate in throughout the year.

As I’m developing the groups, I’m going through my LinkedIn contacts to invite those who practice in those areas to participate. And I’m seeing a lot of this: 

Continue Reading Let’s Get Specific – On LinkedIn

Yesterday, we covered the first part of the social media session from the Legal Marketing Association’s Annual Conference. Today, let’s jump into part two! 

Next up, on the panel we had Melissa Croteau, the CMO of Nixon Peabody. Her role on the panel was to talk about how a large firm handles social media. Nixon Peabody started using social media in 2009, beginning with Twitter. They currently have 2,500 regular followers, with a majority of those being media.

Because I’m always trying to follow the tweet stream, as well as live tweet, when I’m at a conference, I also was keeping an eye on the tweets coming out of other sessions. From another session at the same time, Russell Lawson posted what turned out to be a timely suggestion for our group as well – he noted that journalists are using their Twitter stream to find interesting or out of the ordinary story ideas, so firms shouldn’t post the same old thing all the time. If Nixon Peabody has so many media followers, they must be adhering to this idea already!

Continue Reading Social Media is Here to Stay – An LMA 2012 Re-cap Part II

You may have guessed that I have a certain fondness for social media. I’ve touted its benefits here before, so it should come as no surprise that I headed straight for the social media session while I was at the LMA Annual Conference in Dallas a couple of weeks ago.

Before I get into the nitty gritty of the presentation from the panelists and my thoughts, I’ll share what the CMO of Nixon Peabody said during the session – “The most significant thing a marketing department can do in 2012 is to develop a social media strategy.”

These are bold words from an industry that was still wondering whether social media had staying power only last year. And I couldn’t agree more. Although, I would go a step further than that and say that rather than creating a separate strategy, social media should instead be used to enhance and drive existing strategies and projects. If the tweets coming from the other breakout sessions were any indication, all of them were mentioning social media in conjunction with their topics – the possibilities for using it for law firms are exciting and valuable.

Continue Reading Social Media is Here to Stay – An LMA 2012 Re-cap Part I

Recently, we’ve been looking more in-depth at the ILN Marketing Specialty Group roundtable, which focuses on what mid-sized firms are doing in social media.  Today, we look at question four, which asks "How do you and your firm connect with your firm’s top clients and top prospects via social media?"

Do Kim Dung: Leadco, as a firm, does not have connection to our firm’s top clients and top prospects via social media. Certain partners and associates within the firm do use Facebook and LinkedIn in their professional capacities to connect and communicate with clients and colleagues.

Simone Fell: As with Leadco, lawyers connect with clients and prospects individually through LinkedIn and their personal Twitter accounts. We have not done much to advertise our social media presence. This will likely only change once we have a policy in place and have determined a better way to generate timely and interesting information that top clients (who already get our newsletters) will want to read. 

Continue Reading ILN Marketing Roundtable: Connecting with Clients and Prospects

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of co-presenting a webinar with Kevin O’Keefe on Blogging Basics.  During the call, I mentioned a couple of blogs that I recommend, and I thought I’d share my full list here, as well as my notes about each!

  • Corcoran’s Business of Law Blog: Tim’s blog makes me a better marketer, because he’s always making me think and challenging me to keep an open mind.
     
  • The Legal Shakeup: Rebecca Wissler and Laura Gutierrez author this blog, which offers stories and advice from two rising stars in the legal marketing industry. 
     
  • Myrland Marketing: This is Nancy Myrland’s blog, where she offers marketing advice to the legal community, with a social media focus.
     
  • The Legal Watercooler: This is one of the first legal blogs I followed, and it’s still my go-to source for inspiration. Heather Morse does an excellent job of balancing blog voice and personality with the issues that lawyers and legal marketers face.

Continue Reading My Favorite Blogs

The last two weeks, we’ve been looking more in-depth at the ILN Marketing Specialty Group roundtable, which focuses on what mid-sized firms are doing in social media.  Today, we look at question three, which asks "Do you have a social media policy in place? If so, how are you handling training on both policies and proactive use of social media and tracking of results?" 

Do Kim Dung: Leadco does not yet have a social media policy.

Simone Fell: Not yet, but it’s in development. We already have policies regarding employees’ use of technology and some of the issues would be covered under that. We used to track social media as a firm but we now have a number of lawyers with individual accounts who tweet/blog about a combination of personal and work-related issues, which why it’s even more critical that there be a formal policy in place. We have done some training on how to use social networking tools, which highlighted best practices (eg be conscious of who’s in your audience and don’t broadcast every thought you have without considering the impact) and have offered pointers at our business law and litigation department meetings. We expect lawyers to take a common-sense approach to their online business development activities and consider the same Law Society guidelines that govern other mediums. Continue Reading ILN Marketing Roundtable: Social Media Policies